Phases, transitions, and boundary conditions in a model of interacting bosons

Abstract: We carry out an extensive study of the phase diagrams of the extended Bose Hubbard model, with a mean filling of one boson per site, in one dimension by using the density matrix renormalization group and show that it contains Superfluid (SF), Mott-insulator (MI), density-wave (DW) and Haldane-insulator (HI) phases. We show that the critical exponents and central charges for the HI-DW, MI-HI and SF-MI transitions are consistent with those for models in the two-dimensional Ising, Gaussian, and Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) universality classes, respectively; and we suggest that the SF-HI transition may be more exotic than a simple BKT transition. We show explicitly that different boundary conditions lead to different phase diagrams.